The present embodiments relate to generating a synthetic two-dimensional mammogram with enhanced contrast for structures of interest.
In the context of breast cancer screening, digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is regarded as a promising modality that may replace two-dimensional (2D) mammography currently used in clinical practice. By providing three-dimensional (3D) information on the breast anatomy, DBT reduces dramatically the amount of false positive findings arising from the superposition of normal fibroglandular tissues in conventional 2D mammography.
DBT increases the workload of radiologist due to the larger number of slices to be inspected. To make diagnosis and lesion searching more efficient, a solution is to synthesize a two-dimensional mammogram from the three-dimensional DBT volume in order to guide the radiologist to the most relevant locations. The goal is to obtain an image that is comparable to conventional 2D mammography (FFDM—Full Field Digital Mammography) and may serve as fast overview of the DBT acquisition as well as for comparison with prior FFDM acquisitions. If FFDM and DBT are acquired together, a synthesized 2D mammogram may exhibit complementary information to the FFDM.